


i traded forever to just hear you say the sound of my name

by whal



Category: The Owl House (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mutual Pining, amity and luz - they'll be happy somehow, fluff if you squint enough
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27145201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whal/pseuds/whal
Summary: Older. When they’re older.Luz would maybe tell her about the water that runs the Earth; how it pours--how it claims whatever it pours.Into the Cathedrals, the gardens--Do you see how afraid she was? This stretch between the sea and sand, this foreign land, and the only separation is the space of her hand from Luz’s.All of them are drawn to the black moonless water, the quiet drums inside her chest, a name she can’t articulate.Do you see how afraid she wasfor Luz?--orAmity Blight; a character study.
Relationships: Amity Blight/Luz Noceda
Comments: 8
Kudos: 229





	i traded forever to just hear you say the sound of my name

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to [Dani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ddullahan/profile) for helping out with my fic! Their other socials: [instagram](https://www.instagram.com/d.dullahan/) | [tumblr](https://ddullahan.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Song: [Sodus - Cemeteries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR3Osz_5r14)

_Fading old ports, send them off to cast_   
_The hazy water will never pull them back_   
_You found the pieces washed up in the bay_   
_You say you saw a cold light through the grey_

* * *

She must have felt it working in her bones. The terror sloughing its way through her system like slugs.

It’s begun. 

She flips through the pages, papers print the same stories over and over--but each time is more different than the last. Unique to the characters bound together in void black ink, their love printed in pride. 

Her story was here too, but only ever scribbled in the margins. Penned with panic, the letters squished and frantic to the very precipice of each page.

Has she checked the obituaries? The long line of columns--the words blur at the edges of every ‘Am’. She’s in this story too. 

The creaking wood of the old library and the bookshelves moving themselves to their stationery. The romance section echoes with childish laughter, memories she had no right to cherish and yet she’s a criminal in more ways than one. 

She cuts her thumb on a page and stains it. These paragraphs embrace the sunset discoloration. Pale amber skims over the bones of another body in mourning.  
  


Already, someone forgets how their first kiss went. Not how it felt like-- just how it went. 

(Like love was meant to be bleed from you.) 

The phone-- Where is the phone? The phone near the desk just shy outside the reading section. The phone doesn’t ring. 

It beeps and hums slowly, and bites at her hand if she doesn’t answer it back. 

(But the phone keeps ringing.) 

(And ringing. And ringing. When nobody’s home.) 

And she has this fear. 

_Luz opened her diary. The pages spilled out like accidental ink on old paper, printing the same mark over and over._

That if she pulls back her flesh to reveal pearl-white bone beneath the seething skin, to see how nervous the shaking of her hands really is when the bones clink together, 

_The Star wailed. She heard herself popped out from the pages. Weakness. The shadows in her own rib cage cracked and exposed to the light._

it would give her away. 

_“What are you, Luz?”_

See, see, the thing is-- 

_“Are you a poser? A nerd?”_

She blends into--or at least one day-- she’ll blend and melt into the soil. Like how the name Willow gives life to exhilarating seeds of the things she’s touched, hers will one day be one with the air she kisses, 

_“I know what you are.”_

and the memories she’s forged through the nights of trying to be someone better without the courage to do so. To the misguidance, the stick. The carbon. 

_“You’re a bully, Luz.”_

So the story begins, again, at the same printed pages. 

_Otabin pulled her_ _into his clutches_ _._

Oh, to build herself a home. To feel like she finally belongs. 

_“Why are you doing this?”_

She’s worked hard at being the hero in her own life but she’s never felt quite like it. 

Even as a kid. 

_“I’ve been reading you since I was a kid.”_

Every so often she searches through the registry for the list of displaced people, 

_“I know you’re not like this-- Someone changed you.”_

_Otabin looked at her. Hollowed eyes searching for her soul._

_He sewed her into the collected pages, one by one the thread closed up another memory from her life._

and her name is still on it. 

Look at her, look at all the things she’s become. 

She’s all-- all these figures in the room. (Faceless silhouettes.)

_And Azura barged in through the entrance._

_No, no._

_This was Luz._

She’s all these books in the room. She’s waiting to be cracked open. To flutter from the pages. Transformed. 

_Luz was brave._

She searches the crevices, reads the crinkles of book covers like palms. All for love. For the laughter. 

She’ll search it for her whole life if she has to. 

_Luz was brave and everything that Amity wasn’t._

She’ll stay on the back porch while the world tilts itself forward to slumber. 

_“Follow my lead. Stay with me.”_

Until what she loves misses her enough to call her back to her destination. 

* * *

_“I don’t know! I didn’t even think it’d work.”_

_She looked at Luz._

_“I was all like ‘ROARRRR’!”_

_(A wave of emotions came over her--strong, tyrannic. So impulsive she didn’t recognize it. It might have been grief for a moment. It might have been relief.)_

_Luz wore her heart on her sleeves._

_(Amity thought it was recognition.)_

_And she started to laugh._

She would say she was too busy looking at Luz to notice Otabin turning to them. Yellow, bright blinding signals going in her head. 

_Otabin grabbed them and for a second Amity feared the moment was gone._

_\--But as Luz lugged onto the eraser and she carried little Otabin in her arms, something else changed._

_“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”_

Would she have told herself that too? Would she never blame herself for the tumultuous rage she felt inside her? 

Who could hold her accountable but herself?

_Something else did change._

_“It’s okay. We’re still friends.”_

_Amity nodded at Luz, listening to the_ _thump_ _of closed pages and Otabin--her very first friend--disappeared._

* * *

_“This really doesn’t make up for reading your diary--”_

_Luz looked at her, hurried her hands into her book bag and dug out its content._

_“Here.”_

_Amity_ _brushed over_ _the hard book cover,_ _fingertips whispering over the surface_ _._

(Otabin spend his days alone amongst the many books he’d sewn.)

_“I noticed you only have up to four.”_

_Amity held onto the book like it was her soul._

_Like it was Luz that handed a part of her soul back._

(With needle and thread--the pages he mend.)

_“Thank you,” she said._

_Amity hesitated, and turned back._

_“Maybe … you aren’t a bully.” She looked away._

_“And I haven’t exactly been the friendliest witch either.”_

_Her and Luz inherited a palace of locked doors._

_“I’ll … think on that.”_

_And one of hers was unlocking from the inside._

(But all the while he longed for a friend.) 

* * *

“Does it ever go away?” Luz remembers asking Eda. (Or at least that’s how she knows she’s said it.) 

(Maybe it was to Camila. At one point.)

Eda in her nest; Luz near the window sill.  
  


The glass shards were still broken, scattered, feathers ruffled up along Eda’s arms. Receding one by one, like the way the seconds tick past as you wait for your heartbeat to return to normal. Those silent, shaking moments after a nightmare.

It was right after the curse, light glyphs lingering on the wall. Luz didn't like the shadows that clung to the corners of the room, still. The magic helped.

Eda looked over to her from her bed, “I don’t think it does kid.” 

“At least not for me, it hasn’t.” 

Eda picked at a loose feather. 

“It’s been going on for a long while.” 

Luz grabbed a notepad and sketched another light glyph. The shadows were quaking.

(She thinks there’s a meaning behind her name.)

“It changes though.” Eda smiled at her. 

“The weight of it, I guess.” She continued on, hands stretched out momentarily as if hugging the horizon, and got up from her bed. 

“At some point it becomes bearable.” 

Tap, tap. 

Another glow emitted itself. 

“It turns into something that you can crawl out from under,” 

“and carry around like a brick in your pocket.” 

Luz stared at the half-drawn glyph on her notepad, readying herself for the many questions going off in her head. She looked to Eda, and the words locked themselves back behind her lips. 

“But kid. Sometimes you forget about it for awhile.” 

Her mentor picked up the empty elixir bottle. “So-- So sometimes you still reach in for it for whatever reason. Expecting a bottle, or a pen--” 

Luz couldn’t help but notice the tight line Eda was focusing her eyes on. 

She felt a warm hand ruffling her hair. 

“And there it is.” 

* * *

Any chance this was the right time?

They say she was there to come and to stay, maybe a year or maybe two. 

Here, the garden has gone mad. Willow’s fingers tickling the laughing plants; Willow avoiding eye-contact with her. 

Willow’s dismissive eyes among these gardening tools that they have made up to make up. 

Willow laughing on the Roller Ghoster rides; Willow on the swing with her dads; Willow talking to her under that little fort near the sea lines. 

Willow’s awkward hair phase. Elementary crushes--where the worst thing to happen was her thinking about how cheek kisses would go. 

Amity thinks about Willow and her abomination and the little laughter as they walk past the classroom’s doors, nervous for the first day of school. 

She opens her locker and she thinks about the plants that sprung to life, and she thinks about her green hair and how color coded her mother wanted it to be. And green and green and green and all that green--

It was just a reminder that all that green, all swallowed up by Willow’s absence. 

Amity loved it then. 

(She wished she could tell Willow how she loved it then.) 

She often thinks about what it is like to wake up and live in a wide house all alone, smothering the ghost that tells her this isn’t it, this isn’t it, this isn’t it. 

She remembers the orchids in the garden, ugly things that withered away from her black touch. Willow devoted her time to them and now they’ve grown teeth in their mouths. 

Any chance?

Any chance that all those burnt memories can be replaced?

But this is all that remains: a handful of burnt papers, photos, here and there with the ripples of a bundled up map. 

Somewhere one of the many parts of Willow died off, and another (inner) Willow savored it. 

_Out of sight, out of mind._

* * *

She was fidgeting. 

“Me? Avoiding?” 

“No, no. Let’s skip it! Let’s ring the bell!” 

She couldn’t seem to get out of it.

Her mind was like a brook. 

“Amity.” Luz placed a hand on her shoulder. 

“You gotta … you gotta stop being weird.” 

Always seeking. Always running. Always murmuring. 

“We have to fix all of them.” 

“Unless …” Luz hesitated, eyes on the brown lines fading into Amity’s hair. Something about it reminded her of familiarity. She wanted to reach out and touch it. 

“You have something you don’t want me to see. But I’m not here to judge.”

_She never did._

“I’m here to help Willow.” 

Amity was born with an arrow in her heart. 

(Is it because I still can’t do magic?)

“Help?! All you’re doing is prying into your friends’ lives!” 

(Ami, I’m sorry I got us in trouble at the beach, I just can’t get the spells right.) 

It is painful to pull at it, and it is painful to leave it. She can feel her pulse against it sometimes, knocking against the shaft like her heart was trying to expel it, drawing it in for consumption.

“Did you ever think it’s none of your business?” 

(Well, that is why! It’s because you’re a _weakling_.)

For a split second Amity felt a moment of deja vu. The pitting fire in a body of coal before her. 

(Willow was always burning but no one knew her name.) 

She held onto Luz’s hand, fear gnawing at her chest, thumping so loudly in her throat as if it was fit to burst from her veins. 

Inner Willow was rage. All rage.

Isn’t all that rage so ugly? And it was all Willow, wasn’t it still? Good god, all of it was hers. Pictures burning. An exorcism of the memories that shouldn’t be there anymore. 

Amity felt like she was dancing with rage, inwardly again and again. 

(You can’t do magic so I don’t wanna be your friend.) 

“I used to be made up of all the emotions. Until Amity stumbled back into my life,”

(Now go!) 

“Now all I feel is _anger_.” 

Amity’s hands. They were shaking. 

Today she witnessed the tremors of an ongoing acrimony. A row of plants with blindfolded eyes and surrendered hands before a stonewall. An Inner Amity flailing her arms in despair. 

To have felt the humiliation. To touch at the grief of each of the many memories she erased away and felt it enough, she’d have to become a monster with many hearts. 

“Then you let your new friends pick on her for years. All because you thought she was weak.” 

But she wasn’t the monster in this story. 

“Now I’m just finishing up what you started.” 

It was time she stopped convincing herself otherwise. 

“Wait Willow--”

The fire stopped in its tracks. 

“Please.” 

She may be a coward, but cowards can change. Monsters will always be monsters.

“Before … Before all of this started, there was something else.” 

They say grief is an amputation, but hope is an incurable hemophilia. [1]

(But … But she’s my best friend.) 

(Good children don’t squabble, dear.)

Amity bled. And bled.

And bled. 

(Now sever your ties with Willow. Because if you don’t--) 

(Then we will.) 

She looked to the side, her hands falling apart and their pieces amending to Willow’s. 

Amity knew this from her heart, “You were never too weak to be my friend.” 

But to ask for forgiveness from others was just a means to an end she told herself. 

“I was too weak to be yours.” 

To ask forgiveness from Willow meant she didn’t have to do the harder work of forgiving what she harbored inside. 

* * *

Has she told Luz this story before?

The story in that memory of her and Willow by the beach. 

Once a year before that Willow tried to swim without her floats, on Amity’s suggestion. 

In her struggles to keep the water from entering her lungs, Willow clawed her way up onto Amity’s worried hands. 

Willow hit her head by the docks through short gasps, a faint forehead scar from the deep end of the seas. 

Amity never asked though. 

Never asked how it felt.

But she did imagine how it’d have turned out. 

_“What does it feel like?”_

_“Ami,” Willow looked at her._

_“Not everything feels like something else.”_

(What you did in there … I can’t say we’re friends, but … it’s a start.) 

Amity still imagined the same conversation.

_“I forgive you, Amity. I forgive you because the amount of pain you felt each day you stayed will take years to undo._

_I forgive you for feeling as though you don’t have the years_

_to forgive yourself.”_

* * *

_It’s not just you._ [2]

Amity remembers her own cocoon. At the beach--where Willow once was. 

She remembers inciting her first spell, the happiness dwelling up inside her. So _so_ happy she ran across the field, the sparrow singing at the edge of the woods. 

_Your father and I, well we--_

Her mother’s warm palm cradling her cheek that afternoon, her other twirling on Amity’s curls. 

_You come by it, the ugliness inside you--_

The green dye simmering into her hair. Wet splotches of it hitting the floor, drowning into the towel. Wondering if it’d be better to drown herself here, just to save her mother the trouble.

She remembers the leaking water tapping into the sink. 

(One. Two.) 

_You were born broken, that’s your birthright._

(Two. Three.)

Amity stops drawing herself with the brown patch in her hair afterward, sitting so brightly--so linear with her views. 

(Three. Four.) 

_So now even if you can fill your life with your projects, your books and your little abominations--_

Amity stares at the brown dye on her table, and she thinks about her legacy. Her fragility. She thinks about Luz, and Edalyn Clawthorne.

Her curse. 

How broken must one be, how the longing and loneliness swallows her up so whole that teeth and feathers were starting to form at her skin. 

Amity was stuck there in this cycle--

And her birthday was coming soon and she was getting older, and they were celebrating her fourteenth birthday, and soon the fifteenth, 

and soon the sixteenth. 

She was getting older but she wasn’t growing up, and her heart was getting soft dark spots like a fruit going bad, 

_and that little human you’re mingling with._

like too many hands have squeezed it--too many dyeing sessions to get the right color, some too bright some too dark--but then they all put it back down. 

_But it won’t make you whole._

* * *

“My name is Luz.” 

“Luz Noceda.” 

She draws on the paper--first the circle, then the triangle, the owl staff layered on top, and two lines across. 

Luz cradles Amity’s hand, her palms so warm she feels it seeping into her skin. 

“Amity--” 

Luz circles on the light orb, putting her very creation into Amity’s palms. 

“Luz also means light.” 

* * *

_Turn the station, there's something crawling in_   
_The hounds are restless, can you hear them sing?_   
_The water rises, trembling as it breathes_   
_You said you felt a quick shift in the breeze_

* * *

Older. When they’re older. 

Luz would maybe tell her about the water that runs the Earth; how it pours--how it claims whatever it pours. 

Into the Cathedrals, the gardens--

Do you see how afraid she was? This stretch between the sea and sand, this foreign land, and the only separation is the space of her hand from Luz’s.

“Amity.”

Do you see how afraid she was?

“I have to go back.” 

All of them are drawn to the black moonless water, the quiet drums inside her chest, a name she can’t articulate. 

_It’s not yours._

_It’s not mine._

_Listen--_

Amity grits her teeth, biting inside her cheek. 

“Okay.” 

Do you see how afraid she was 

for Luz?

* * *

Her and Luz, what could work would work. 

She’ll call for her, and they’ll light a fire in the forest, on The Knee, and watch the stars wrap up the little space and recognize each other in the place that is theirs. 

She won’t wait, though. She won’t tell Luz the story later. 

This stretch between the sea and the sand, this walk on the shore, before the tides cover everything both Luz and her have done. 

Life is short. But she wonders about the books that she read about humans. About how their life spans infinite to an amount so short that they became desperate. 

A part of her envies it. Because at any given point, any given moment, it might have been Luz’s last. 

(Everything is much more beautiful in that awareness of death. In the acknowledgement of transience.)

She’ll never be lovelier to Luz than she is now. 

She has-- vast, vast, a finite but it feels so infinite amount of time in her hands.

She remembers her and Luz laughing. And she wants. She simply wants, and what is it on the other side of want? She wants to hold Luz’s hand. See the smile in her eyes. 

She wants to find the path they can travel together, but--

Her want is so wide that she can’t cross it. 

Though, listen, listen. 

It’s begun.

Look: space. Somewhere a lost key. What was an accidental flow, an echo in the wind is now a bird sitting outside her window singing with perfect pitch to the song that's on the tip of her tongue. Their tongues.

The heart opens, closes, opens. 

Gasping.

Her and Luz, what could work would work. 

But as Amity sits down in the forest, as the monsters coo from their nests, in the dark she hears movements--a squeak, a hiding. 

Her heart lurks in her chest. 

Luz’s return to the human world is soon. 

She never minded being on her own; Until something broke inside her; 

Until she felt like she didn’t belong. 

And she wanted to be home. At the end of the line where Luz was. 

Hand in unlovable hand. 

* * *

They were in a room--the room where everywhere was cosmic knowledge, where everyone got what they wanted. 

“I can read the marks you bear,” Luz said to her. 

Amity felt a hand woven itself into her hair. 

“There’s just so much Amity.”

(So much shame she couldn’t articulate.) 

They were finally in the room where everyone got what they wanted.

Here she was leaving Luz clues. 

_This is the Sun, and these are the stars._

Amity carved it out on the sand: first the circle, then the triangle, the owl staff layered on top, and two lines across.

( _And this is where you are, to me.)_

* * *

_I love you,_ Amity imagines herself telling Luz. 

And they were--

They were in a room where everyone finally gets what they want. 

(Her makeup runs in the shower like blood from a wound,) 

(but not everything she scrubs would come clean.) 

The three most difficult words in the world. 

But what else can she say?

(Her fingernails filled with the right shade of green.) 

* * *

_In the night they'll find you all alone_   
_With the color red surrounding your throat_   
_They were in their bedrooms, eyes were closed_   
_When the siren sounded, they woke_   
_In the night they'll find you all alone_   
_With the color red surrounding your throat_

**Author's Note:**

> [1] David Mitchell, “Slade House”  
> [2] Bojack Horseman, Season 2, Episode 1: “Brand New Couch” 
> 
> Title taken directly from [The Truth About Heaven - Armor for Sleep](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTyPy8lWCc4)
> 
> Gorgeous fanart for this fic can be found [here](https://frankielucky.tumblr.com/post/633581502021730304)
> 
> Beta reader: [Heulo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heulo/profile) (thank you so much once again :'])


End file.
